Workshops for college students and other news

It’s all go at the moment. I suddenly got involved in running a series of workshops for the trainee teacher college students. I had been planning to do it, I just didn’t know when and then all of a sudden I got the chance.

On Wednesday, I had around 40 chemistry students and spent three hours demonstrating and explaining active teaching methodology with examples and use of number fans. I then moved on to classroom displays and teaching aids. They all seemed to enjoy it – I managed to get quite a few laughs in, especially the “draw a horse in one minute” task to show them that sometimes an iconistic picture is enough and there is no point wasting time drawing photographically accurate pictures.

The students all got to use rulers and, like last year, I caught a few starting measuring from 1cm instead of 0. It seems really funny that in this part of the training I am teaching 18-20 year olds the same lesson I give my 8 year olds back in the UK. Of course, some of these 18-20 year olds have never really had the chance to use a ruler – certainly not in primary school.

Another big laugh came from a number fans demo when the students have to select a picture from the 0 – 9 board. There were pictures I had drawn like “Mr Men” for different sizes, colours and shapes, so for example I would ask “Which one is the big, red, square.”

Well this time I asked “Which one is Dibaba? (the college Dean.) It’s really great when you can tap into humour when the people you are talking to have English as a second, or third language.

Now, as part of Negessa and Aberham’s training (The guys sent from the remote woredas to work with me for two months), they will be giving the training to two more groups of students on Thursday and Friday.

Recorders

Recorder groups continue, including the group where two of my students are teaching a new group. This gives me yet another insight into teaching. I can watch people who are not trained teachers trying their ideas of teaching. Last week they were a little nervous but the main thing I noticed was that they were forgetting that what they know, their students do not know.

Home Alone

Göran is away for the week following up his training in college last week (training that, due to some guy in an office 700km away translating the time, the duration and the number of attendees wrong nearly didn’t happen!) He will be helping people from different woredas get their computers up and running (themselves hopefully!)

Rain

We’ve had the old spot of rain over the last couple of weeks, but over the last couple of days we have had sudden periods of very strong wind and on Wednesday, this was followed by moderate rain. This is quite a bit different to the pattern of weather last year. The up-side is low temperatures, the downside is increased humidity and mud!!!

Electricity

The power situation has been pretty bad recently. So far, in the 18 days of March we have had long blackouts on 12 of those days.

Creatures

I found a small scorpion in my room on Wednesday morning and in the evening I kept hearing a knocking on my door. It turned out to be a frog jumping towards it, maybe thinking it was a large hole.